Glitz, glamour and humour: Why you need to see Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians has been one of the most hotly hyped Rom Coms of the summer – and at last the film – based on Kevin Kwan’s bestselling 2013 novel and directed by Jon M. Chu– opens today in cinemas. It is, in turns, a hilariously bitchy, awkward, saccharine tale of poor girl meets rich boy – that’s supercharged with a fabulous dose of OTT, suspend-your-belief opulence. And it’s on course to be a cult classic.

The premise of the story is that Rachel Chu, a whip smart Economics professor from NYU (played by Constance Wu) is in love with Nick Young, a dashing, kind, seemingly middle-class historian (Henry Golding). They have a blissfully happy life together in Manhattan and Nick’s humble, everyman status is cemented with the with the fact he doesn’t even have his own Netflix account - ‘you borrow mine,’ moans Rachel.

Crazy Rich Asians

Warner Bros

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Despite this, he is hiding a secret: Nick is heir to a notable real estate fortune. His family is among the richest in Singapore – a place already populated with serious wealth. Nick’s family is ‘old money’, however, owning swathes of Singapore and is therefore anointed as: ‘Crazy Rich’. This is something Rachel only learns when he takes her to meet them for the high society wedding of the year, at which Nick is best man. It turns out that Rachel has bagged Singapore’s most eligible bachelor and not everyone is happy about it.

The film shows its heroine in numerous crippling social situations, made worse by her not being prepared to hobnob with extreme wealth. The child of a single mother, she is a firm outsider and worse – a foreigner, only interested in self-fulfilment and not duty, or so the family believes.

There’s lots of bitchiness: vicious jipes, dispensed in hushed tones, and with a sinister faintly-amused smile in the case of her potential mother-in-law Eleanor who insists that Rachel will never be good enough for her son. There is a raft of socialites determined to replace her. (In one scene, a dead fish is thrown on her bed with insults daubed on the wall in its blood.)

Crazy Rich Asians

Warner Bros

And of course there’s lashings of wealth: There’s Gemma Chan (who plays Nick Young’s lovely and damaged sister Astrid), dressed like Grace Kelly, going on ‘a little shopping spree’ and hiding the haul – notably, a rare giant diamond in the bathroom. There’s a stag do on a container ship with a DJ and a bevy of beauties flown in for the hell of it. There’s a society wedding where all the guests, clad in absurd couture, arrive in Rolls Royces. And during the ceremony a flurry of water is sent flowing down the aisle to create an atmospheric river.

The biggest laughs are elicited from Rachel’s best friend Peik Lin (played superbly by the actress and rapper Awkwafina) and her family –who are her solace in Singapore when being around such a snippy family becomes too much.

It’s a riot of surreal Pygmalion style moments, glitz, glamour and humour – with predictable fairytale tropes. It’s all a lot of fun.